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2001-11-18 Thanksgiving Day is rather late in the year for a harvest festival...

November 18, 2001

Thanksgiving Day is rather late in the year for a harvest festival. The
fields have been harvested many weeks past, which is why most countries
have their festivals in October. We urban dwellers are a bit fuzzy
about these things. The closest we may get to amber fields of grain is
Gristedes. Frozen foods and air transport mean that we can eat nay kind
of vegetable any time of year, and Chilean sea bass is not exotic in
Manhattan anymore. Thanksgiving Day attests that earth's bounty is not
to be taken for granted, and that we have been especially blessed in
our nation with a freedom from want that is unique in history.

The day is one time when the Church obliges the bidding of
the civil government for prayer. It is not a holy day of obligation,
for such holy days celebration aspects of the mystery of redemption.
The President asks all citizens to give thanks to God for all of our
nation's blessings, first of which is the bread by which we live. It is
ironic that the Puritan settlers in the Plymouth Colony are so much
associated with a thanksgiving feast, because they were dogmatically
opposed to ritual feasts, and they had rejected the Holy Eucharist
which supernatural grace makes into the highest possible act of
thanksgiving. We have been told often enough that "eucharist" is
thanksgiving in Greek. But thanksgiving is almost a definition of
civility, Puritan or Catholic. Parents begin to civilize their little
ones when they get a gift: "What do you say?" And the answer "Thank
you" starts the child on the paths of all good things. This is more
than a lesson in etiquette. It is training in the art of an eternal
grace: Saying thanks to the giver changes a passive receiver into an
active associate of some sort. That is not putting it well, but it does
help to explain how gracious thanksgiving can make people into good
citizens, earthly and heavenly, by making them patriots and saints. The
categories are not inseparable, but neither are they contradictory.

A nation that ignores its God loses its souls, they way any
individual does. In time of war, a Day of Thanksgiving remembers the
harvest fields, but also the battle fields, praying for the victory of
justice, and thanking God for a civilization which we took too often
for granted without saying "thank you" until it was attacked before our
very eyes.